Re: Participatory Planning

["Mark S. Knell" <mknell@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Barkely,

I think your last message to Allin is on target. Industrial innovation
occured within Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. But I think that the
predominance of a sellers' market is important here. Arnold Pacey wrote
an interesting book titled "The Maze of Ingenuity" and subtitled "Ideas
and idealism in the development of technology". Idealism has always been
important to industrial innovation. Maybe winning the Stalin prize was
sufficient motivation to innovate. Unfortunatly it sounds like your
mother-in-law didn't reep extra profits nor the Stalin prize.

One problem of a sellers' market is the lack of demand pressures for
innovation. The role of demand pressures in innovation was taken
up by Schmookler and has been very controversial in the innovation
literature. In Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union there was considerable
entrepreneurship in the scientific community but not very much in the
enterprises. I seem to remember reading once that new firms often had to
be created in the Soviet Union to get new products to the market.

Mark Knell
The University of Vermont

P. S. This white stuff is beginning to melt in Vermont. These means that mud
season is just around the corner!